Optimised aftermarket network strategy enables automotive OEM to meet significant growth targets and customer promise.
Successfully starting-up a new organisation is never easy, not least in the rapidly evolving and long established Automotive & Commercial Vehicle sector. OEMs must consider how to manufacture the product at a preferable economic cost, while maintaining resilience and quality. They must also look to develop innovative buying mechanisms, compelling marketing strategy and, not least, sourcing and shipping the parts and finished product to customers all over the world.
Often in the case of new start-ups, the learning curve is steep and there are many blind spots, a common one being the limited foresight to spare parts and aftermarket operations with the primary focus being on production of new vehicles.
The implications of this can be profound for an organisation and customer experience – increasingly, customers require that retailers affect a service or repair very quickly or even proactively, sustainably and to better quality, all of which demands significant focus and has significant impact on the required capability of the parts and service supply chain, the aftermarket.
Unipart Consultancy is harnessing the Unipart Group’s end to end automotive supply chain experience and capabilities to support a number of newly formed electric vehicle brands, who have begun to enter the commercial EV market in recent years and are revolutionising last-mile logistics by delivering safer, more sustainable electric trucks and improving urban environments for all.
One market leading commercial EV brand has designed a highly innovative product which positions them at the forefront of the sector in terms of sustainability, driver comfort and the safety of others in urban environments, as well as developing an innovative and industry leading vehicle ownership model.
The ownership solution overcomes the traditional cost and complexity barriers surrounding commercial vehicle electrification, by providing a packaged solution of vehicle, access to charging infrastructure, servicing, maintenance, insurance and training to B2B customers, resulting in maximised uptime and operational efficiency through a scalable and environmentally conscious service provision.
2023 promises to be an exceptional first year of production for this full-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services provider with a strong confirmed order book for its full-electric commercial vehicle. With a strong and growing order book, and vehicles due to start rolling off the line of the company’s European manufacturing facility in early Q2 2023, this manufacturer has the challenge of a growing vehicle parc (number of vehicles registered for road use) and a pressing need for a scalable aftermarket logistics network to support the customer ownership model.
How we helped
Unipart Consultancy has been working with this customer since early 2022 to support the specification and design of the aftermarket network and future strategy that is essential to support its production ramp up and customer promises.
The project began with a series of cross-functional workshops, facilitated by Unipart Consultancy and comprising customer teams including Procurement, Production, Logistics, Sales & Service, Human Resources, Projects, Customer Services and Business Systems. This gave our consultants an essential view into the current state, the scope of the network design and the nuances that the customer teams were facing across their business and supply chain enabling a clearly defined and documented set of requirements.
The Unipart Consultancy team then took existing customer data and applied our best-practice understanding and experience from both automotive and commercial vehicle logistics and supply chains to establish what the future vehicle parc looks like over the next 5 years, from which vehicle serviceability and parts consumption assumptions were able to be derived and categorised to create intelligent data sets.
Demand projections were then analysed to give a view of the logistics centre-of-gravity and dynamic warehouse and resource scaling to meet this growing demand. This was modelled against a series of options, parameters and sensitivities, with a business case applied to each to demonstrate an assumed view of the best options, both current and future state aligned to production forecasts.
In parallel to the Supply Chain consultancy, our Systems consultancy team worked alongside the customer teams to specify and design a holistic systems solution to support the needs of the aftermarket. This comprised consideration for warehouse management, carrier management, inventory optimisation and dealer systems to give a future state high-level architecture solution and implementation plan.
Benefits
The collaborative approach that Unipart Consultancy took with this customer enabled the creation of an integrated, scalable and flexible aftermarket logistics strategy informing scalable network solutions, and a systems infrastructure to support rapid production scale up, future growth and aftermarket requirements.
These two strategic benefits that have enabled immediate and long-term advantage to be achieved;
- Critical aftermarket strategy was a key enabler towards executing the strategic objective of this OEMs customer promise and ownership model
- An effective aftermarket strategy directly supports the brand service for this OEM by enabling strong customer service, minimised vehicle downtime and reduced customer attrition
- A scalable solution that can grow and pivot according to volume fluctuation scenarios – a major benefit to emerging businesses without mature supply chain and volume data
Talk to us about how we can help transform your supply chain to meet your customer demands.